The Ghost in the Library

Katherine Mansfield's writing came to be a defiant gesture against illness; for years she knew how precariously she lived: the medical report among her papers in the new acquisition makes the situation quite clear. Her final pleas were a delirious, optimistic bargaining: give me more time; I am ready to write authentically. She sketched out a plot to A. R. Orage a few weeks before she died: ‘Two people fall in love and marry. One, or perhaps both of them, has had previous affairs, the remains of which still linger like ghosts in the new home […] the ghosts still walk.’ In a sense, that unwritten story played itself out after her death. There was Murry's disquieting marriage to her likeness, Violet le Maistre, and Mansfield walked through her husband's next two relationships too, as he obsessively lionised her life and work, her stories gained a wider audience and her biographies were written. Decades later, long after Murry's death in 1957, Mary Gamble, Murry's fourth wife, was an active participant in maintaining Mansfield's legacy. The papers brought into the Turnbull in 2012 show that Gamble continued to field correspondence relating to Mansfield, all the while nursing her own aspirations to be a writer. More than that, each new acquisition of Mansfield's papers into the library resuscitates her spirit, bringing her back into sharper focus and allowing us to see her from new angles, cast in new lights.